The shadow home secretary’s belief that B&B owners should be allowed to turn away gay couples led to what Daniel Hannan called “manufactured outrage”. Contrary to what rent-a-quotes claimed, the issue was not whether homophobia was right, but about the balance between principle and practice, with Grayling arguing that people’s livelihoods should not be destroyed to prove a point. I’ve stayed in guest houses in Ulster run by elderly Presbyterian couples who, without doubt, believe that practising homosexuals are doomed to burn in hell (and being a Catholic, I’ll no doubt be joining them). I don’t agree with their view, and neither do I like the thought of the hurt it might cause a couple who turn up on holiday to be reminded of all the hassle they thought they’d left behind – but I don’t necessarily want to force them out of a business, especially as their views are dying out with them.

Grayling has learned his lesson, which is to say absolutely nothing off-message from now on, but the idea that it revealed some secret dark heart of the Conservative party is hilarious. ­Have the people claiming this ever been to a Tory party event? I was brought into the party by a local chairman, who is gay, and a local PPC, who is also gay – it’s no big issue and I only know because we’re Facebook friends. In my experience – and, admittedly, I do live in Haringey, which is not a stronghold of the Free Presbyterian Church – the Tory party is very gay-friendly.

Conservatives are, by their very nature, opposed to revolutions, and the sexual/social revolution of the 1960s is no different, but as with all revolutions there are positives; and Tories are almost entirely unanimous in agreeing that society’s changed attitude to homosexuality was a good thing.

As with the elderly B&B owners, this is no doubt an age thing – my generation are more enlightened, or perhaps brainwashed by EastEnders (which, I have to admit with due credit to the Labour party’s Michael Cashman, did change attitudes for the better). Either way these changed attitudes do not undermine secular conservatism in the same way they cause problems for liberal Christianity.

Conservatives dislike social disorde; we’re often quite timid creatures unnerved by things like public displays of violence and yobbery. The state’s encouragement of family break-up threatens our social order; a weak and ineffective justice system threatens social order; so does mass immigration, all of these products of the surge leftwards from the 1960s onwards – but gay rights and gay equality do not. To put it in terms that will annoy Guardian readers as much as possible, any group of people who increase house prices in one’s area are going to be acceptable to conservatives.

Eric Kaufmann, in his recent book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, compares the European and American Right, and suggests that the Republican party has gone down the road of moral conservatism because high levels of immigration make ethnic nationalism too much of a vote loser. They instead focus on another cause of social disorder, sexual liberalism, through which they can attract Hispanic and other non-white voters, including Muslims.

He suggests the European Right may, once immigrant communities become large enough, go down the same road. I think it’s more likely to go the other way, with acceptance of gay rights becoming seen as benchmarks of European values against the threats of Islamic encroachment. That’s what is happening in the Netherlands, where two-thirds of gay men vote for Right-wing parties, and where Geert Wilders is one of many gay-friendly nationalist politicians, a phenomenon also seen in Scandinavia. But whether England ever gets a Wilders, the Left isn’t ever getting its gays back.